


First Lines

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Gen, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2018-10-28 13:42:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 26
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10832442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: Tumblr meme:  Write one line.  I'll write the next five.





	1. Opening Day

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: various  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this work and no infringement is intended.

"Mulder, why is William wearing that?"

“It’s Opening Day, Scully.”

She gazed at their son, who was kitted out from head to toe in a child-size Yankees uniform. His face was painted like a baseball, which made for an eerie effect as he grinned at her.

“At least Mom will think that the pinstripes look dressy,” she sighed, “but it isn’t really church-appropriate, just for future reference."


	2. Steadfast

"It doesn't matter, Scully. I'm not going."

“You and I both know what will happen if you don’t,” she said, unhappily, her eyes fixed somewhere to the right of his head.

“I don’t care,” he said, kneeling in front of her and taking her hands between his, the way he had so many times before. It felt like the only way to get her attention in these desperate moments, some sort of supplication, kneeling before their shared grief. “You and William are the only things I care about right now.”

“Then go,” she said, but her voice wavered and cracked.


	3. The Reason

"The world without you is not worth saving."

She looked down at the space between them, at the way the toes of her shoes nudged up against his.

“Mulder,” she began.

“I mean it, Scully,” he said, his fingertips tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. “Twenty years of searching and you’re the reason.”


	4. Misinformation

"Fifteen? Really? Wow."

“I know.”

“It wasn’t really fifteen, Mulder.”

“Scully, when have I ever lied to you?”

“Off the top of my head? Once, twice…Mulder, I’m going to run out of fingers.”


	5. Lo Mein Love

She is standing in a weedy lot, wet, eating day-old Chinese takeout, and he thinks he might be in love with her.

She twists lo mein around a plastic fork and guides the mass to her mouth, snipping the noodles efficiently with her teeth. The precision of her strikes to the heart of him; Scully means everything she does. She looks up and meets his eyes, raising one eyebrow in question ( _what, Mulder, do you need something?_ ). He shakes his head ( _nothing, Scully, just thinking_ ) and steps toward her, his horizon, his promised land.


	6. Raindrops

Raindrops are chasing each other down the glass and he stares at the driveway, wondering for the first time in years if she’ll come.

It was his birthday yesterday. She always remembers. Yesterday, he heard nothing from her, but maybe she’ll come today, out to the house where she’s left him alone.   
Hope isn’t something he should have anymore. Still, it visits him once in a while, the thing with feathers, soaring out of reach.


	7. Roses

Twelve, seven, odd or even, he never could remember how many roses he should buy only that it never was enough to convey how he feels, even if was his birthday and not hers.

He filled the house with them. A dozen red roses in the bedroom: that seemed right. Seven lavender roses in the bathroom to light her way. Two dozen pink and white roses split between five vases in the kitchen and the living room, plus one laid across her dashboard. It wasn’t enough, but it was something to make up for the desert years of their wandering, when there had never been roses.


	8. Your Home Or Mine?

“Let’s go home,” she says, wearily dusting off her hands. The local police will take it from here, but Scully was the one who cuffed the guy.

“Your place or mine?” he teases, and she tosses her hair back, eyes glinting and cheeks flushed.

“That wasn’t exactly what I meant, Mulder,” she says, but there’s something warm underneath the stern tone. 

He protests his innocence - “All I meant was dinner, Scully, what are you thinking?” - but they both know there’s something slouching towards ecstasy, though it might take the second coming to arrive.


	9. Mulder Wakeup Call

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rated R for consensual sexual situations.

A hand climbing slowly up the inside of her thigh is her favorite variation on the Mulder Wakeup Call.

She prefers it infinitely to the tinny insistence of her cell phone. She smiles, turns her face into the pillow, and tips her hips toward him. His fingers slide smoothly over the silky fabric of her pajamas and pause at her waistband, thumb hooking inquisitively into the elastic. She reaches down and flattens her hand over his, guiding his fingers into her pajamas and then into her underwear as they touch her together.

“Good morning,” he murmurs, and she moans.


	10. Wild Griffon Chase

“And that’s exactly why we should do it!”

“Mulder, no.”

“Do I need to go through the thirteen-point plan again, Scully? Did you not like the charts?”

“The charts were very enjoyable, Mulder, but no, we’re not going on some wild goose chase without better justification than a handful of graphs.”

“Not a wild goose chase, Scully, a wild griffon chase.”


	11. Greyscale

No gold and red and blue around could ever replace the colors of her.

His world was grey with her gone, colors even muddier than usual. Even the gold of the necklace he wore didn’t glint anymore. He wasn’t eating. Flavors had faded out along with colors. He lived in a drab hazy twilight, all the light gone with her.


	12. Cake

“No, please Scully, I didn’t mean it like that, can I have some of that cake? Please?”

“You have your own cake.”

“Yours looks better.”

“Order a piece for yourself, then.”

“Come on, Scully, it’s not like you’re afraid of my germs.”

“First of all, again, this is my cake, under my sole jurisdiction, for my fork only, private and confidential, and second, definitely not after what you just said.”


	13. In Flagrante

Mulder had expected a lot of things to happen the night of his Anniversary, but finding himself and his wife caught, as naked as the day they were born, by their four year old son was not at all what he'd envisioned.

Will stood solemnly in the doorway, eyes wide, and he put his thumb carefully into his mouth, something he hadn’t done in months. 

Mulder hurried to pull the covers over both of them, but he kept fumbling with the fabric and exposing new patches of skin. 

“Close the door and go sit on the couch, sweetie,” Scully said with surprising calm. “Your dad and I will be out in a minute and we’ll talk about it.”

“How do you do that?” Mulder asked as the door swung shut, but Scully just smiled.


	14. Beard Burn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rated R for consensual sexual situations.

"Mulder, I love you, but I swear to God you're going to have to shave that beard if you keep intending put it in such places." 

“You don’t love the beard burn, Scully?”

“I’ll admit it adds an interesting dimension and what some might term a textural experience when judiciously applied, but I was going to wear a skirt tomorrow, and at this point, my thighs feel like they’ve been sandpapered, which isn’t a great start.”

“What about a targeted application, like just here?”

“Ahhh…yes, that’s fine. Oh, Mulder…you can shave tomorrow.”


	15. Menstruation

Scully drags herself to work despite the cramps and malaise but regrets it as soon as the midol wears off and nausea joins the mix. 

She hunches over her keyboard, trying to sublimate her pain into the painstaking detail of a report. She’s a doctor, she tells herself, and she knows the dosage on the bottle won’t even come close to overloading her system, even if she takes another dose right now, but something in her refuses, whether it’s fear or stubbornness. She’s worked here too long to draw that line anymore.

When she gets back from lunch, there’s a coffee on her desk - nice coffee from the place the next street over - and on top, three ibuprofen.


	16. Pedantic

"I have no idea what you just said"

“That’s because you weren’t listening, Scully.”

“No, I was listening, Mulder. It’s just that the words you were saying don’t make sense in terms of conventional English grammar or modern thought.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re a little pedantic, Scully?”


	17. Mistaken

"You misspelled 'adipose'... oh, how the mighty have fallen."

“First of all, Mulder, medical vocabulary isn’t the strong suit of autocorrect, and second of all, you once misspelled Bureau twice in the same report,” Scully said, still typing.

“I don’t remember that at all, Scully,” Mulder told her, kicking his feet up on the arm of her chair. 

“It was the case where…oh, it was Eddie Van Blundht.”

“I’m sorry about all that,” he said after a long pause, “you deserved better from me.”


	18. Change A Day

"Scully, you once told me you wouldn't change a day... what would you say if I asked you now?"

“I’d change the days we were apart,” she said without hesitation. “I’d go with you to Oregon, no matter what it meant. I’d go with you after Georgia, and leave our old lives behind, the way we did after the trial. I’d leave with William, and never let him be alone, not even for the hours it took for him to travel to his new home. You and I would have been together, and we would have found a way.”


	19. They Said It Was A Weather Balloon

Something flickered in Mulder's peripheral vision, and he wondered if he was hallucinating again.

“Swamp gas,” Scully muttered. 

“Or a will-o-the-wisp,” Mulder said automatically. But if she was seeing it too, that boded well, unless they were both hallucinating, trapped in the same delusion the way they’d been trapped in the giant fungus, or in the morass of conspiracy.

“If those were real, we’d be in trouble,” Scully murmured, “since it’s fools who follow them.”

Even without looking, he could feel the dry wryness of her self-deprecating little smirk, the one mirrored on his face.


	20. Free The Nipple

"Your nipples are light brown? I always imagined they were pink."

“You know what they say about assuming, Scully. Besides, I thought you’d seen my nipples before - we went through that swimming phase in the early 90s.”

“I think you’re thinking of Krycek, Mulder.”

“Oh, right, I mix you two up all the time. Anyway, sorry to ruin the mystique.”


	21. Lonely

"It is past midnight and you are lonely and I am lonely like you."

He didn’t say it out loud, but every move he made was poetry, and oh, she couldn’t help but agree. Two such lonely souls, and where had she heard that before? Her heart sang for him like a plucked string, perfectly in tune with his.

It is past midnight, she thought, into the magic hours where reality was suspended, where mistakes might be discovered to be fate, where two lonely people might find comfort in each other and be redeemed and made whole. She cupped his face with her palm and he closed his eyes, her fox tamed for a little while, quiet under her hands.


	22. The Best Way To Conserve Body Heat

Mulder zipped the tent flap closed and looked down at his partner, who was bundled in at least five layers and cocooned in her sleeping bag.

“Scully, you’re going to overheat.”

“I’m barely maintaining a slow thaw,” came the muffled voice. “I’m defrosting like meat on the counter.”

“That’s a vivid image,” he said, shaking his head.

“If you’re not going to warm me up, shut up,” she said, peering through the tangle of cloth, and he grinned and kicked off his boots.


	23. Insensitive

"For a profiler, you're pretty insensitive sometimes!"

“Yeah, well, for a scientist, you’re almost always precise.”

“Mulder, that is in no way a witty rejoinder.”

“My profile of you says that sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you, Scully. A witty rejoinder would be wasted on you with respect to this particular conversation.”

“Well, I can’t argue with that, which you’ll admit is a first.”


	24. If Only

If she had only turned back, let it alone, just said no...

But she had never been the type. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” her father had said with a smile. Bill was his son and heir, but she and Missy were the ones who had inherited the stubborn notion that the edges of the map held marvelous wonders, though their interpretations took different forms. She had peered into the deepest mysteries of the universe, delved into the atom and the human heart. 

No, there had never been a chance of her refusing this opportunity, but the price she paid was dear.


	25. Exsanguinated

Why is there so much blood? she thinks, dazed, watching it pool and eddy around her shoes.

Some part of her knows why, could calculate the way the gush of it will slow as the pressure in the system decreases. But that’s abstract. Blood is not confined to numbers. She crouches next to the heifer, stroking its forehead. 

“Fucking aliens,” she murmurs, as Mulder waves his smartphone over his head and shouts at the sky.


	26. Karst Area

“Remind me again, please, how we ended up in another hole again Mulder?”

“This is a karst area, Scully. The bedrock is unstable. And I may or may not have felt the need to touch the tail of a giant mutant alligator.”

“The extremely juvenile and foolhardy need, you might say, as said alligator pursued us until we fell into this sinkhole, which is not even the first time we’ve fallen into a hole in Florida, as I’m sure I don’t have to remind you, nor was it our first giant mutant alligator.”

“…it was cool though.”


End file.
